Simplify Your Online Life: Practical Ways to Find Balance
When we go online, the idea is to find useful information and then shut it away. But often you can end up more online than needed, fighting your way through ads and captchas, to find the information you want.
Of course giving up social media is a huge step forward to simplifying your online life. Here are a few more simple helpers, to give you more time offline!
Extensions to simplify your online life
Download free Adplus Block (it’s free!) Seriously, in one second – pop-ups, ads and other annoying stuff to surf through when you work online disappears – pop!
Of course, some sites then won’t let you visit (so be it). If you do wish to visit certain sites that only allow ads, you can ‘whitelist list’, but the rest goes! Once downloaded, you”ll never go back.
While you’re at it, also download Unhook (this will remove all the ‘recommended videos’ in the sidebar, if you want or have to watch a YouTube video).
And while we’re at it (there’s a theme here), download I Don’t Care About Cookies (so each time you visit a site, you won’t have to keep clicking pop-ups to reach the page you want). Saves you time, then you can turn off and go outside in to the fresh air!
What about annoying captchas?
There’s not a lot you can do about these, as the onus is really on the companies that put them on websites. Not helpful if you require urgent information (say to find lost pets).
Some are getting simpler, asking you to ‘click three simple images’, rather than the endless clicking of motorbikes and fire hydrants, that never ‘let you in’ no matter how many times you click. Companies can choose to switch to:
- Cloudflare Turnstile uses a simple piece of code to confirm visitors are real (yet still blocks unwanted bots) without slowing down web experience.
- Friendly Captcha again respects privacy, by letting the software solve the puzzle. And enabling easy access to the website, yet still blocking bots and spam.
Choose a decent browser
Many people still use old browsers that are very slow and don’t work well. Visit Browse Happy and pick your favourite, which will help you spend less time online, as they are quicker:
Choose an alternative search engine
Google is effcient, but many of these work on Google anyway, so you get the benefits, but also support alternative causes:
Ecosia (add to Chrome – it’s free) is solar-powered and donates 80% of revenue from ads to non-profits that so far have planted over 200 million trees worldwide (now the biggest reforestation scheme on the planet). It has planted 3.5 million trees in Brazil, and reforested an area destroyed by wildfires.
To switch, just click the three dots at top right of your screen, click settings, then select ‘switch search engine’. You’ll find the option for Ecoisa. Select and you’re done!
Ocean Hero sponsors others to remove five plastic bottles from the ocean, each time you search the web. By working with an organisation that pays people in economic poverty to recover ocean-bound plastic in Indonesia, Haiti, Brazil and the Philippines.
Startpage is a private search engine that never saves or sells your history and is a free extension to Google chrome. Based in The Netherlands, your IP address is removed from servers, and third parties are blocked from accessing third party data to target you.
Anonymous View acts like a VPN, but without an account or fees. Just click the option under search results to activate. The company makes money through (sponsored links). You also have the option of removing AI results.
Mojeek provides independent results from Google or Bing, through their own ranking algorithms. Therefore results are quite different (you can also turn off Wikipedia results if you don’t want them). And as results are not coming through other search engines, results are faster. And does not crawl child sexual abuse materials or malware.
DuckDuckGo is used by tens of millions of people, blocking trackers from Google and Facebook, targeted ads and cookie pop-ups. It also blocks email trackers and deletes browsing data with one simple button.
Swisscows (free on Google chrome) is a family-friendly search engine, with no violent or pornographic content. With no storage or sharing (Switzerland has high protection standards). It also offers affordable VPN and Swisscows.email.
A good idea to also switch email to free Proton Mail (quick to set up, this gives a nice email address from a Swiss company that doesn’t track you and is easy to delete. I’s ad-free and you don’t have to give your phone number to set up an account. It also offers offers an affordable VPN and again a secure email at Swisscows.email.
Do search engines really track you?
Some build profile datas to target you via ads, and there are safety concerns for those who wish to remain (say people on witness protection schemes or escaping domestic abuse).
Why can’t search engines stop online child abuse?
This is often a question asked. Actually this time it’s not usually up to them, as most is carried out on peer-to-peer networks like What’s App or the so-called ‘dark web’.
Report concerns to Internet Watch Foundation and Childline’s Report Remove tool.
Good preventive measures include:
- Encouraging children to spend less time online.
- Teaching children about online safety
- Choosing smartphones for kids with built-in safety apps
- Bark app is a good solution for the US (not available elsewhere).
Reasons to take a digital detox
A digital detox does not mean having to never go online again. It just means taking some time away from the laptop or phone, to spend time reading, walking, sleeping.
Once back, you can then set new habits like ‘no apps or phones after dinner’ or ‘no scrolling for news at night’ or ‘not checking messages first thing in the morning’.
You can set your digital detox to any length you like. You could just have a 1-hour rest, or an evening off, and even a whole weekend or week. Set your phone to only essential notifications, charge your phone outside your bedroom, and use a real alarm clock – or sleep in!
In her wonderful book The Joy of Missing Out, writer Christina Crook decided to take a 31-day Internet fast, to simply learn about a world that wasn’t totally revolved around the web. She did this after hearing a ‘man of the cloth’ blessing Blackberries (the phones, not the fruits).
She did eventually go back to working alone, but set her own rules on how and when to do so. And felt a lot better for it.
